On their first Gold Star Christmas, fallen Marine's parents look back

Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon is remembered by his family at his parents' Pomona home July 25, 2017. Lennon died in a military plane crash on July 10 in Mississippi.
Peter Carr/lohud

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Rosemarie and Owen Lennon with a photo blanket of their son, Owen Jr., given to them by a well-wisher they've never met. They've been moved by the outpouring of love and gratitude they been shown since their son, Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon Jr., died in an air crash this summer.(Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)Buy Photo

Through December, reporters will be looking back at and following up on stories and topics that were the most popular with our readers in 2017, according to metrics on lohud.com. This story is part of that series.

POMONA - Last Christmas, the split-level home on Palisades Court was filled with love and laughter, dressed for the holiday, with candles in the windows and a big tree in the front room.

For the first time in years, Owen and Rosemarie Lennon's three grown children — Kelly, Rachel and Owen — were all home, and brought with them their significant others: Kelly and her boyfriend, Charlie; Rachel, home from teaching English in South Korea, and her boyfriend, Adam; Owen, a Marine sergeant, brought along his fiancée, Jenn.

Owen and Jenn had just found a house in Montgomery in Orange County and would soon make an offer to buy it. Under the tree were gifts for the soon-to-be homeowners: a bucket of tools for Owen, kitchen tools for Jenn.

Kelly, a school principal in The Bronx, bought matching pajamas for the three couples, who beamed as they posed for photos on the stairs, in cozy plaid flannels.

"It was the best Christmas in years," Rosemarie recalls softly. In other years, "Rachel could be in South Korea for Christmas, Owen Jr. could be away for Christmas. But we had everybody home last Christmas."

This Christmas, there are no lights.

No tree.

No Owen.

On July 10, 2017, the refueling plane carrying Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon Jr. and 15 fellow servicemen crashed in a soybean field in Mississippi. There were no survivors. An investigation into the crash is still under way, with a report expected next month at the earliest.

The only star in the Lennon house this holiday season is the Gold Star, the one that identifies them as having paid the ultimate sacrifice, giving up a loved one in military service to their country.

A different Christmas

This Christmas will be as far from last Christmas as the Lennon family now is from the family they were then.

"This year, no decorations,” Rosemarie says. “No ... no ... no."

"Owen loved being home for Christmas. There's no doubt about it. We just don't have the heart. We'll go to church, but to decorate the house for Christmas is too painful. We're kind of not doing anything that's in the usual Christmas tradition."

Sitting beside his wife at the table in their tidy kitchen, Owen Sr. speaks softly, with the Dublin lilt he shares with his bride.

"This Christmas, we're just going to pass, as if it's just a couple of days," he says. "We won't mark it as anything. Just a couple of days."

They won't pretend that this first Christmas without their Owen — the adored youngest child and only son — will be easy.

But they've been buoyed by friendships they've made in the five months since his death, by a thousand Mass cards and boxes of letters that have found their way to them, by the memory of strangers who lined the route their son’s hearse took from Pomona to the Orange County Veterans Memorial Cemetery in upstate Goshen in July.

“People have been fabulous to us,” Owen Sr. says.

"We'll never forget at the funeral, the outpouring of love from all the different fire and police departments, and people lining the roads and the overpasses," Rosemarie says. "And the people of Goshen."

Adds Owen Sr.: "The town of Goshen was lined with people, with flags and hands over their hearts."

"That we will keep in our heart for always," Rosemarie says.

‘A respectful cemetery’

Owen Sr. has a poet's heart, but he can't help but edit himself as he speaks.

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Rosemarie and Owen Lennon with a drawing of their son, Owen Jr., at their Pomona home Dec. 7, 2017. Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon Jr., died in an air crash in Mississippi this summer.(Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

"When we get past — past! — when we get further down the road from where we are now, emotionally, we'll think back on that with a real gratitude and with honor," he says. "That was outstanding."

They make the 45-minute trip to the cemetery in Goshen at least once a week.

There's no headstone yet, but there's a grave marker from the funeral. They place his laminated Mass card — which bears his photo — on the grave "so we can look at him," Rosemarie says. "We keep replacing it, with the weather. It's a nice picture of him."

"It's a very respectful cemetery," Owen Sr. adds. "The VA cemetery is very nice, as cemeteries go, It's well taken care of."

He pauses, and then, speaking even more softly, he permits a mix of despair and resignation to color his voice.

"We just feel we shouldn't be going there. It's not right to be going there,” he says. “But we have to go there. We can't believe we're going there. We never imagined we'd be going there."

His voice tails off.

In the days before his son’s funeral, Owen Sr. spoke eloquently about the gratitude he felt for getting to know the man who died a month before his 27th birthday.

“It was a good short story,” he said at the time. “It was meant to be an epic.”

Five months later, he grasps for the right words to try to convey the loss he and his family feel.

The deeper the love, he says, the worse its loss hurts.

“If we were to take the first 26 years of his life, just short of 27 years, and say 'That was just great. That was outstanding. Life couldn't have been better.' Now, outside of that, that's all gone away and the world going forward is without all that. And that's a huge empty part there that we can't fill and don't know how to fill.”

Keepsakes from strangers

The week before their son died, they were in Sarasota, Florida, for Owen Sr.'s 62nd birthday. This son of Ireland was born on the Fourth of July.

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A flag flies at Owen and Rosemarie Lennon's Pomona home Dec. 7, 2017. Their Marine son, Owen Jr., died in an air crash this summer. (Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

They were reflective, talked about all they had been through, how they'd raised kids who managed to stay out of trouble.

"We felt very lucky, very blessed, very all of that, all of what we wished other parents to have, especially in today's age. It's difficult raising children," Owen Sr. says. "And we were glad where we were and that the kids could all fly their own lives now and that they didn't need us as much. We could kind of say, 'Well, you did a good job there,' and take stock of where are we now."

Within a week, their world was upside-down.

In a small upstairs office in their home hangs a pencil portrait by artist Michael Reagan, based on a photo of Owen. It captures the young Marine at his vibrant best, sunglasses atop his head. He seems to leap from the frame.

On a rocking chair in the corner is draped a quilt sent to the family.

"That's another thing people do," Owen Sr. says. "They make things for you and send them to you. Almost every day, we get a Mass card or something. We have letters from the president on down to his commanders up here, and (Defense Secretary) Gen. Mattis, everybody," he says.

"Strangers write to us and say 'We don't know you, but we feel your pain and we want you to know we're praying for you,' and 'Thank Owen for his service.'

"Honestly, we have letters in there we haven't responded to yet. In the first month, we did a bunch of them and we just ran out of energy for it. It drains you. We started again, but there's lots of people we haven't replied to or thanked yet."

"They say grief takes a lot out of you," Rosemarie says. "Just going to work and coming home is a day in itself. Grief takes a lot of energy."

Simple kindnesses

Rosemarie talks of how her daughters miss their younger brother, the one who grew to tower over them.

Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon, of Pomona.(Photo: Courtesy Lennon Family)

Shortly after Owen's funeral, in August, his sisters and his fiancée Jenn Mathias took a trip to California to mark what would have been Owen's 27th birthday.

"They were in an ice-cream store in Santa Monica or L.A., having ice cream for Owen's birthday, and they were crying, upset," Owen Sr. says. "And the guy gave it to them, on the house."

That made them think of Owen, how he might have had a hand in that, somehow, which made them cry more, so they had to leave the shop.

People who the parents encountered in the disorienting fog of Owen’s death and funeral have stayed in their lives.

Master Sgt. Brian Baker, the Marine casualty officer who guided the Lennons through the logistics of that whirlwind of a July, has stayed close.

"He's part of our family now," Rosemarie says. "He came to dinner last week. He's retired now, looking for his next career."

Rosemarie wears a brooch given her by a fellow Gold Star mother, Anne Murphy of Blauvelt, whose son, Michael, died in the crash of a Marine Osprey aircraft on Dec. 11, 2000.

"They've been wonderful," Rosemarie says. "It's not a family you want to belong to, but they're very supportive."

'Work is the best thing'

Rosemarie went back to work at Lime Kiln Elementary School in September, to co-workers who have supported her all along.

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Rosemarie Lennon at her Pomona home Dec. 7, 2017. Her son, Owen Jr., died in an air crash this summer. (Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

"It's good to work," she said. "It's very difficult to not."

"Work is probably the best thing, in the everyday of things," says Owen Sr., who handles the physical plant of a Lower Manhattan building.

"It's harder for Jenn, because she was in his everyday world," Rosemarie says of the woman who would have been her daughter-in-law. She's back teaching fourth grade in Middletown.

"She's doing the best she can. We text and talk and we see her about once a week."

Daughter Rachel is working for a housing non-profit in Scranton, Pennsylvania, while working on her master's degree in public administration at SUNY Binghamton. She hopes to work in disaster relief one day. Her sister, Kelly, is principal of the K-5 AmPark Neighborhood School in The Bronx.

Jenn and the Lennon sisters ran the Marine Marathon in Washington, D.C., in October, giving the parents a chance to visit the Arlington Cemetery graves of the servicemen who died with Owen.

An unending loss

It would be easier to think of their son on a mission, because he'd be away a lot anyway, his father says.

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Rosemarie and Owen Lennon at their Pomona home Dec. 7, 2017. Their son, Marine Sgt. Owen Lennon Jr., died in an air crash this summer in Mississippi.(Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)

"If you were to think like that, you could detach. But it's temporary."

When a visitor suggests they are strong people, husband and wife look at each other and laugh.

Rosemarie says people have told her mourning can take its toll on marriages. She says she feels blessed and grateful to have the soft-spoken man at her side.

"We'll get by, somehow," Owen says. "We'll see where we are this time next year, but we're still plugging away."

What proves most difficult is the permanence of their loss, of knowing he's not on a mission and they won't see him again, except in a likeness hanging on a wall, or on a quilt a stranger has sent them, or in photos they keep on their smartphones.

One of those photos captures their children, all three of them, in matching pajamas, on the stairs where family photos were always taken.